Now that the official launch of EteRNA is near, the dev team is about to make many design decisions that will help new comers to understand the game, and we want YOUR opinions on some of the toughest questions below.

1. Lab locking

-- We think the RNA lab should be "locked" and cannot be entered until you get 3000 points. This is to

1) prevent people from entering the lab without knowing anything about the game, and get confused
2) prevent people from creating bunch of fake accounts for voting

Where do you think the threshold should be? is 3000 points ok?

2. Intro text

-- Right now, the front page intro text reads

"Welcome to EteRNA where you help scientists understand life at the cellular level. You play by desgining RNAs, tiny molecules at the heart of every cell. If you win the weekly competition, your RNA is synthesized and scored by how well it folds."

What do you think of this text? Can we improve it to make sure the new comers understand the game better?

3. Game slogan

"Played by human, scored by nature" is the current slogan of the game. We want to convey that you'll play the game to design, actually synthesized RNA and see how it really works. Is the slogan doing the job?

4. Way to play the game without registering

Some of us thought it'll be crucial to allow new comers to try out the game without registering. What would be the best way to do this? We could allow them to play tutorials but they wouldn't get reward points, and they'll have to play the tutorials again after registering to get those rewards (This is fixable, but we don't have enough time to do this before the launch next week).

5. Open Logins

Please try to create new accounts and see if that works. Please invite your friends to play EteRNA to test out our new open logins. There is only one week left that new players will be considered "Founding Members" of EteRNA!

6. Facebook Integration

We are still working on it, but this will be available in few days! When active, please try this out. See if you can hook up your facebook account.

7. New "Action Page"

As you will soon see, we have a new action page to greet users. Please let us know what you think. If this does not show up, please hit "Refresh" button in your browser.

8. All-play-at-the–same-time day!

We're moving EteRNA to a new, beefier server and want to test it out. Can we get all active players to log in on Thursday, January 6th at 2pm Eastern Standard Time and play a few puzzles. We'll all be able to say one last hello before the new players arrive, and test out server response time.

Let us know if you have good ideas! We look forward to hearing from you.